Sunday, January 13, 2008

Compost

Perhaps you'd like to see what my Compost piles look like, the ones in the studio, not the big one in the garden. The first photo shows the contents of one of 3 large plastic Compost-to-go boxes, 10" x 14" x 4" boxes with a hinged lid.

The second photo is looking down into one of the large drawers in my work table. You'll notice that there aren't a lot of magazine pages or ephemera in my boxes other than those that somehow relate directly to my life.

Although I once worked with appropriated images torn from whatever books or magazines I came upon I didn't find that to be very satisfying for my more serious work, and I felt that the resulting work could have been done by anyone. So I started preparing my own collage papers and using my own photographs as well as those of family and friends. I do love using ephemera in my travel journals; these bits and pieces of papers collected on location add so much about the place I'm visiting as I work in my journal.

I am a collage artist as well and I LOVE using any type of paper, but magazines most of the time. I love the challenge of making my own image from texture and the disscovery of new material. That is why I appreciated this post of yours so much! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and photos. I would love to see you work in person someday!

Thanks for writing, Katherine. If you go into the "search by topic" in the sidebar you'll find more examples of the papers I use. I've eliminated most magazine papers from my own stash in favor of the papers I prepare myself. Some are from magazine, manipulated somehow. It's always good to look for images that reference my own personal history: people and places, symbols, flora and fauna. That's often what's missing from some of my more abstract work.

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.